(Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association Convention, December, 2000.)

The prison looms today as a central feature of American society. Since 1976, we have been building on average one prison every week. More than two million Americans are now crammed into the nation's still overcrowded jails and prisons. In fact, there are now about as many prisoners in America as there are farmers. Over half of those incarcerated are people of color. More than four million Americans, again mainly people of color, have been permanently disenfranchised because of felony convictions, many under laws enacted explicitly to prevent African-Americans from voting. (1) Studies have shown that this disenfranchisement has had a significant impact on the outcome of presidential and senate elections prior to 2000. (2) We need no detailed studies to show the direct impact of this disenfranchisement on the most recent national election. Prior to November 2000, one third of the African-American men in Florida were convicted as felons and then stripped of their right to vote, while thousands more were purged from the voting rolls as alleged felons by fiat of a corporation hired by Governor Jeb Bush. If only a small percentage of Florida's 204,000 disenfranchised male African-American citizens (not to mention the other 200,000 disenfranchised ex-felons in Florida) had been allowed to vote in 2000, even the U.S. Supreme Court could not have installed George W. Bush as President of the United States.

Hello Brothers and Sisters.
The Prison Industrial Complex also known as slavery keeps me awake at night. I'm angry that today there are still slaves.
How do we progress any further than we have, when the white man still holds some of us as slaves.
HOW DO WE MOVE ON WITH SLAVERY IN THE MIST?
WHAT CAN/WILL WE DO?

If you thought slavery was outlawed in America, you would be wrong. The 13th amendment to the Constitution states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In plain language, that means slavery in America can still exist for those who are in prison, where you basically lose all of your rights. (You don’t gain a lot of your rights back when you get out of prison, either, but that is a different story.) So, given the country’s penchant for rapacious capitalism, it may not come as a surprise that there is much of the American prison system that exploits American prisoners much like slaves.

1. Incarcerated Individuals (Who Are Mostly People Of Color) Are Legally The Property Of The Government2. Prisoners Are Leased To Private Companies For Mandatory Labor

3. Prisoners Work And Live In Inhumane Conditions

4. Prisoners Are Paid Next To Nothing While Corporations Profit Huge Amounts Off Of Their Labor

5. The System Dehumanizes Incarcerated Individuals

For those who need a refresher, "the prison-industrial complex" refers to the overlapping interests of the government and private companies in mass incarceration, and the fundamental relationship between punishment and commerce. In America, imprisoned individuals are forced to work for corporations. And the way in which they are thrown into this labor echoes the kind of slavery we learned about in our history books — the kind of slavery Lamar depicted at the Grammys.

In his song "The Blacker the Berry," Kendrick Lamar proclaims, "I said they treat me like a slave, cah' me black / Woi, we feel a whole heap of pain, cah' we black." He continues on with, "They put me in a chain." Some may hear this as nothing more than imagery, but it's a reality for millions of black people who are incarcerated.

Slaves did not have a choice. American men in 2016 do have a choice. There are many paths Black men can take in this country that do not lead to incarceration. How do you reconcile the actions of the individual (and jail-time consequences) with your thesis?

Slaves did not have a choice. American men in 2016 do have a choice. There are many paths Black men can take in this country that do not lead to incarceration. How do you reconcile the actions of the individual (and jail-time consequences) with your thesis?

Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.

Even more surprising is what gets left out of the chart: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested for selling or possessing drugs than whites, even though whites use drugs at the same rate. And whites are actually more likely to sell drugs:

Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).

This partly reflects racial differences in the drug markets in black and white communities. In poor black neighborhoods,drugs tend to be sold outdoors, in the open. In white neighborhoods, by contrast, drug transactions typically happen indoors, often between friends and acquaintances. If you sell drugs outside, you're much more likely to get caught. Rothwell's numbers shoot some holes into some oft-repeated drug warrior talking points: that people don't get arrested for nonviolent drug crime as much as they used to (false), and that legalizing and decriminalizing certain drugs won't magically solve racial disparities in the criminal justice system (true, although the chart above suggests it could help).

Slaves did not have a choice. American men in 2016 do have a choice. There are many paths Black men can take in this country that do not lead to incarceration. How do you reconcile the actions of the individual (and jail-time consequences) with your thesis?

Click to expand...

And this is your 1st post to Destee? You might want to study the topic to be sure Black men have a choice.

Even if Black men do have a choice, as you say, does that justify performing forced slave labor?

I will address your questions after you study the topic issues. Start with Stop and Frisk, where Black boys and men did not have a choice but to stop and be searched against their will. Often being arrested for some type of minor crime.
Next study the School to Prison Pipeline.
Move on to Private Prisons and mass incarceration.

Found this on Stop and Frisk...
Shira Scheindlin, a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, has ruled that New York City's "stop and frisk" policy violates the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection, as black and Hispanic people are subject to stops and searches at a higher rate than whites. Mayor Michael Bloomberg responded by deriding Scheindlin for not acknowledging the policy's benefits, noting that "nowhere in her 195 page decision does she mention the historic cuts in crime or the number of lives that have been saved."

The policy is now defunct no? They ended the practice. It survives in pockets but is cited as declining. And this is NYC alone.

I am familiar with School to prison pipeline. Plenty of info on it on Google

The phenomenon starts with kids getting expelled and suspended. Do the kids really not have a choice of getting expelled and suspended? If they behaved would they still get expelled and suspended? In DC, most of the officials and teachers are Black. Black admins are processing the expelling and suspending. Are they not giving the kids choices to behave and not get expelled?

After the kids leave (two options: graduate or drop out), how do they get into prison?
Are you saying they have no choice but to commit crime?
Are you saying they will be arrested and incarcerated whether they commit crime or not?

I am not seeing the absence of choice that real slaves had. And if choice is not involved, and this is a racially motivated phenomenon, how are any Black men walking around in society free? Open to discussion, hopefully you are too...